spoilers within.
Clint Eastwood directed Changeling. Ron Howard is one of Changeling’s Producers. Babylon 5’s J. Michael Straczynski wrote Changeling and seems to have insisted that it say A True Story and not Based On A True Story. The cast is impressive from the slightly over the top Angelina Jolie to the totally over the top Jason Butler Harner and the calm and semi-normal people that surround them. With all these powers attached to it, Changeling should have been a bit better than it was.
Changeling wasn’t bad, it just seemed a bit too much of a star vehicle for the very manly Angelia Jolie and her enormous lips. The film starts out by using a Universal Studios graphic from the 1920s and rolls the first of the credits in black and white. The whole of the film is obsessed with dimness and shadows and rainy days. All well suited for the sad and tragic story of a woman who has her child taken from her and a corrupt police department that does her nothing but harm. So it was always a shock when Anglia Jolie and her flaming red gigantic lips took center screen-much as they do in Changeling’s One Sheet.
The casting of Changeling is amazing for the number of unattractive and often downright ugly actors and actresses they found to take on the look and feel of L.A. before the days of Nip N’ Tuck. Oh the leading men, such as John Malkovich and Colm Feore, look their normal Hollywood hansom, but the smaller parts all go to hard and rugged looking individuals. Even the kids are of a type. One of the villains is a boy who does a bang on perfect impression of a young George Bailey from It’s A Wonderful Life. He nailed that whine in his voice when Mr Gower was slapping him upside the head.
Angelina Jolie’s constant screaming for someone to find her son certainly made me want to lock her up, even though the story gave her enough to scream about. The L.A.P.D. return a boy to her, but it is not her son. When she protests too much, they lock her away in a Mental Ward. She then finds out that her son was likely killed by a madman who seemed to enjoy kidnapping boys and chopping them up with an ax. Only, maybe he didn’t kill her son after all-and so on and so forth.
Changeling does an amazing job of recreating 1920s Los Angeles, with several long shots of clear blue skies and a near total absence of tall buildings. Prominent among the city’s features is the Red Car trolley system, which seems to be present every time we see a street. The fashion and the furniture and the cars are all perfect, so far as I could tell. The idea of a downtown L.A. filled trees and grasses is an interesting one.
As with The Devil In The White City, one of the big shocks in Changeling is the presence of a mass killer. This was apparently a pretty famous case at the time, but was unknown to me. It was a bit interesting that one of the key events in the story was the wrongful commitment of a sane woman to a madhouse, while at the same time a madman is put to death by the state.
This is a classic case of you can’t fight city hall, and our hero would have vanished from the face of the earth if she had not had the help of powerful men, including a radio forerunner of the Televangelist and a lawyer who takes her case on for free.
Changeling was a good movie and there were a couple of very moving scenes. It’s the kind of movie that makes you want to go back in time and just slap everyone. Really hard.
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